In the tale of the boy who cried wolf, a boy who is tending sheep and serving as a lookout for wolves seeks to relieve his boredom and gain attention by crying wolf when in fact there is no wolf. This decision/policy succeeds for a while, then it no longer works. A systems thinking model reveals the cause of the behavior over time that occurs, described in the graph below, and the counterintuitive result.

In my explanatory model, inspired by Gene Bellinger’s exposition of the same fable on Insight Maker, the system of interest consists of two feedbacks, one positive, or reinforcing,, and one negative, or counteracting. In one, as the boy repeatedly cries wolf, the towns people come running, and the boy gains increasing attention. In the other, the more times the towns people discover there is no wolf, the more the boy’s credibility is destroyed. Soon the second feedback becomes dominant. Because the boy’s credibility is now zero, when a wolf threatens the town and the boy cries wolf, the people no longer react, and the wolf invades the town. This is the counterintuitive, unintended result of the boy’s initial strategy. Here is a causal loop diagram of the model that shows the two conflicting feedbacks:

Foreign policy decisions can often lead to similar counterintuitive results. Suppose a great empire, in its declining years desperate to retain control of a region of the world that provided it with a critical resource, had adopted a policy of backing decadent medieval theocratic monarchies. It did so because it was easy to extract obedience from these backward regimes in return for shoring them up against the pressures of modernity. However, suppose that in recent decades, modern, secular regimes, benefitting from increasing popular hatred of imperial oppression, had replaced a few of the backward ones and had declared a degree of independence from the empire.

To counter the trend toward secular society, religious leaders in the region fomented their own popular struggle against the empire based on religious difference, which relied on the historical antagonism between the religion of the region and the religion of the empire. Leaders of the most extremist sects had the most success in recruiting insurgents to the struggle against imperial control of the region.

To counter the rise of independent, secular regimes, the empire adopted a policy of destabilization of these regimes by fomenting sectarian conflict leading to insurgency and civil war. As it turned out, religious extremist elements within these states, which had the most to gain from regime change, made the most effective insurgents, so the empire armed them and backed them with its air power.

This policy worked well, and several upstart governments on the empire’s hit list fell. The trouble with the policy was that it was short-sighted. The same religious fanatics that the empire used to do its dirty work also used the ancient religious antagonism to spread hatred of the empire throughout the region and began to fight the empire in its decadent client states. The extremists also had the capacity to inflict terrorist violence in the heart of the empire and its allied states. The empire’s use of religious extremists destabilized the whole region, which erupted in various types of conflict that spiraled out of imperial control, and the ultimate outcome of the empire’s policy was heightened popular opposition and resistance to the empire, a consequence in direct contradiction with the policy’s aims.

As it happened, this account is not hypothetical. The US Empire and its European vassals currently are carrying out the same policy in Western Asia, and reaping its counterintuitive results. The US policy of using Muslim extremists started with arming them in Afghanistan under Osama Ben Laden, a CIA operative, to overthrow a relatively secular government allied with the then USSR. That worked well initially, except for the ultimate outcome: an anti-American Muslim extremist Afghan regime. Then, faced with a Yugoslavia that, unlike the rest of Eastern Europe after the break-up of the USSR, refused to fall prey to Western private capital, the US Empire provoked ethnic conflict to break up the nation, partly by backing Islamic groups. The legacy of that policy is an uncontrollable islamo-gangster state in Kosovo. Later, the US and its allies tried to use sectarian conflict to retain control over Iraq after the US invasion and occupation did not replace the independent, secular regime with a passive, pliant one, but the result was an Iraqi regime allied to Iran, an enemy of the Empire. Subsequent uses of extremists in attempting regime change in Libya and Syria have ended in disastrous loss of imperial control of the situation in both countries. Finally, the result of decades of imperial support for Israel’s extermination of Palestinians has been the Islamization of the Palestinian resistance. The whole process has embroiled the region in conflict and weakened the decadent despotisms that are still obedient to the US Empire.

Here is a causal loop diagram of the relevant feedbacks: Regime Change, which represents the policy goal and its results, and two Policy Drift 1 and Policy Drift 2, balancing loops that counteract the policy and explain consequences that were unexpected and counterproductive from the viewpoint of the US Empire.

Karl North is a student, a farmer, a business owner, and a teacher. His writings can be found at KarlNorth.com.